Chapter 19: Sable

On Tuesday night I stood at the edge of Ronan's forest and told him I was afraid.

The twins were asleep, and the Beta's wife had the couch and a mystery novel.

"I can't make her come," I said. "I've tried for three days."

"I stand in the yard and I push, and nothing happens."

Ronan folded his coat and my sweater onto a stump at the tree line.

"Sable?" he said.

"I'm here," Sable said inside me, dry and unhurried. "She keeps pushing a door that opens toward her."

I laughed, and told Ronan what she had said.

"Then don't push," he said. "Don't make her do anything. Ask where she wants to go."

"I don't know how."

"You do." He took my hand. "You've been telling me where for two weeks."

I closed my eyes.

I felt the pines around me, and the cold, and the bare skin of my hands.

I asked her, as simply as I could, where she wanted to go.

She did not answer in words.

She answered with a wind that rose in my chest and a pull in every bone.

Then came a single thought, clear and loud.

Run.

"Ronan," I said. "I'm going to."

"I've got you," he said. "Go."

It hurt for the length of one breath.

My spine bent and my hands struck the ground.

Fur pushed through the skin of my back, and then it didn't hurt at all.

The world opened up around me.

I could hear a mouse under the leaves forty feet away.

I could smell the rain that was still two hours off.

I stood on four legs in the dark, and I was enormous, and I was not afraid.

Beside me the air shimmered, and a huge black wolf with gray at the muzzle looked down at me with Ronan's eyes.

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